Louis Pasteur
And the Myth of Pasteurization

Editor's Note: I have never set out to trash anyone. My whole reason for writing or researching anything is to find the truth. In writing about Pasteur, I've encountered things I thought to be true which have turned out to be false. This happens. The one thing I pride myself on is that I have always come back to this article to correct the errors and continue my quest for the truth.

If you surf the web, no doubt you will find dozens of web sites singing the praises of Louis Pasteur.

Here is something we found at: http://www.accessexcellence.org/AB/BC/Louis_Pasteur.html

If one were to choose among the greatest benefactors of humanity, Louis Pasteur would certainly rank at the top. He solved the mysteries of rabies, anthrax, chicken cholera, and silkworm diseases, and contributed to the development of the first vaccines. He debunked the widely accepted myth of spontaneous generation, thereby setting the stage for modern biology and biochemistry. He described the scientific basis for fermentation, wine-making, and the brewing of beer. Pasteur's work gave birth to many branches of science, and he was singlehandedly responsible for some of the most important theoretical concepts and practical applications of modern science.

Pasteur's achievements seem wildly diverse at first glance, but a more in-depth look at the evolution of his career indicates that there is a logical order to his discoveries. He is revered for possessing the most important qualities of a scientist: the ability to survey all the known data and link the data for all possible hypotheses, the patience and drive to conduct experiments under strictly controlled conditions, and the brilliance to uncover the road to the solution from the results.

From www.lucidcafe.com/library/95dec/pasteur.html we got the following:

Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, in the region of Jura, France. His discovery that most infectious diseases are caused by germs, known as the "germ theory of disease", is one of the most important in medical history. His work became the foundation for the science of microbiology, and a cornerstone of modern medicine.

Pasteur's phenomenal contributions to microbiology and medicine can be summarized as follows. First, he championed changes in hospital practices to minimize the spread of disease by microbes. Second, he discovered that weakened forms of a microbe could be used as an immunization against more virulent forms of the microbe. Third, Pasteur found that rabies was transmitted by agents so small they could not be seen under a microscope, thus revealing the world of viruses. As a result he developed techniques to vaccinate dogs against rabies, and to treat humans bitten by rabid dogs. And fourth, Pasteur developed "pasteurization", a process by which harmful microbes in perishable food products are destroyed using heat, without destroying the food.

UNESCO proclaimed 1995 as "The Year of Pasteur." Just prior to that, Pasteur’s family proudly released his notes and research. Gerald Geison, a science historian, was among the first people to thoroughly review those notes. In 1995, The Year of Pasteur, Geison published his book entitled THE PRIVATE SCIENCE OF LOUIS PASTEUR.

Geison discovered from Pasteur's own notes that he'd deceived the public a number of times, "borrowed" heavily from his competition, but in the end was still very much a genius who left the world a better place.

One reviewer wrote:

Pasteur is not attractive: aloof, gruff, authoritarian, secretive, competitive, a ruthless opponent. That, from the point of view of his science, is irrelevant. His misconduct about anthrax and rabies is much more reprehensible, though as regards rabies, perhaps he could defend himself in terms of the terrible problem of coming face to face with a dying child he thought he could help.

THIS book provides a fascinating and detailed account of much of Pasteur's life and of French science in the last century. But its aim is wider. Mr. Geison thinks the episodes he examines have a contemporary message: Science, like any other form of culture, relies on rhetoric; objective, value-free science may be a myth. In fact, no matter how brilliant a scientist's rhetoric, in the long run the truth will out. Social factors influence the course of science; the outcome is determined by nature.

Splattered all over the web, and at one time here, is the "so-called" fact that the New York Times published an article called, "Pasteur’s Deception." That article does not exist nor has it ever existed, at least at the New York Times. The article published in 1995 is this one: THE DOCTOR'S WORLD; Revisionist History Sees Pasteur As Liar Who Stole Rival's Ideas.

Pasteur was not a fraud. He was a scientist who, like all scientists depended upon grants to continue his research. Thus he was often motivated to lie in order to get ahead of his competition and get the money he needed to get the job done. In fact, the first reference to Pasteur (above) tells us how he debunked spontaneous generation. Geison's book refutes this because Pasteur's own notes show that the results of his experiments failed to put to sleep the concept and that Pasteur would simply make up a new explanation for his failures.

However, history seems to remember only Pasteur's successes and and has buried the work of his contemporaries who, though admitting to Pasteur's "germ theory," saw past that and realized a whole other world of theories existed. These other theories were not going to make people rich.

The germ theory of medicine has made billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry, probably trillions over the years (if you take into consideration inflation). Had Pasteur's contemporaries, such as Bernard and Bechamp, won the spotlight, medicine today would be enormously different and totally unrecognizable.

Dr Sam Chachoua, in his lectures, points out that if you graph deaths by infection over the years, you will see that they were dropping when antibiotics arrived on the scene and that the use of antibiotics did not significantly change the rate at which deaths by infection dropped.

Where to begin? Well, let’s begin with the Germ Theory.

As discussed in The Lost History of Medicine, some of Pasteur's contemporaries felt that the terrain is more important than the germ.

Pasteur described germs as non-changeable. We know today, from the Royal Rife's work that microorganisms are pleomorphic, that they can change and often do. A bacterium can mutate into a yeast or fungus and back again. Royal Rife saw this and even photographed it. He even saw a bacterium "poop" out viruses, as he described it. The problem is, no one alive today has ever seen a live virus. Rife's microscopes have all been destroyed . . . or rather, they were all maliciously vandalized.

(And we have been violently criticized for publishing such "bunk" by every know-it-all on the web; but the facts stand: Rife reported all this and they eventually killed him for it. Our web site is listed with others who are "germ theory deniers." Most people reject Royal Rife's work, reject Pasteur's contemporaries (Bernard & Bechamp), and reject naturopathy that still today performs research on a "healthy terrain.") 

Modern medicine will never acknowledge the pleomorphic nature of germs because it would turn the pharmaceutical interests on their backs like a helpless tortoise. Again, we follow the money.

Medical tests take your blood and then fix it with a dye. They freeze the blood in a fixed state. The germs therein are frozen in time. This is not real life. Germs change, blood moves; life is a process, not a fixed state.

It was Bechamp who first discovered the pleomorphic nature of germs, and later on Bernard described the "milieu" or environment that affected/caused those changes. Bernard is the one responsible for our theories today on pH and how the nature of the microorganisms change as the body moves from an alkaline pH to an acidic pH. It should be noted that this movement is not great. The pH of the blood fluctuates between 7.35 and 7.45. At 7.0 the body would slip into a coma. Many websites and theories out there fail to address the this very slight significance and believe our pH can fluctuate at ridiculous rates.   (This is covered in depth in our article The Lost History of Medicine.)

Myth Busting

On his deathbed, Pasteur recanted, saying that Bernard was right; the Terrain is everything, the Germ is nothing.

Another problem with the Germ Theory of medicine is discovered when we look at Koch’s Postulates as they apply to Pasteur's experiments:

• The bacteria must be present in every case of the disease.
• The bacteria must be isolated from the host with the disease and grown in pure culture.
• The specific disease must be reproduced when a pure culture of the bacteria is inoculated into a healthy susceptible host.
• The bacteria must be recoverable from the experimentally infected host.

Pasteur never quite fulfilled all the rules, as Gerald Geison points out in his book, THE PRIVATE SCIENCE OF LOUIS PASTEUR. He was not able to find the germ in all cases of a disease, and this is where his research bordered on the fraudulent. A really huge problem was when Pasteur passed a germ from one animal to another to cause the disease, he did not pass the germ alone, but took some blood with it. Injecting toxic blood from one animal to another proves nothing according to Koch.

One of the first books published that took a serious look at the work of Pasteur in an unfavorable light was Bechamp or Pasteur, written by Ethel Douglas in 1923. It has since then been reprinted under the heading, Pasteur Exposed, a more dramatic title that would guarantee more sales.

Douglas’s book describes Pasteur as an ambitious self-promoter. She shows how Pasteur plagiarized Bechamp's work in unraveling the mysteries of fermentation and the causes of disease in silkworms. But Pasteur wasn’t as bright as Bechamp and made some very serious mistakes in both his interpretation of Bechamp’s work and subsequent theories and practices which he later espoused.

Dr A. Lateud, at one time editor of the Journal de Médecine de Paris, charged that whereas in 1850 France had produced 30 million kilograms of cocoons, its output had sunk to 15 million kilograms in 1866-7 due to the epidemic. After Pasteur’s methods of ‘prevention’ had been introduced, production shrank to 8 million kilograms in 1873 and as low as 2 million kilograms in subsequent years. He continued:

– by the complicity of the Academies and public bodies, which, without any investigation, reply to the complaints of the cultivators: ‘But sericulture is saved! Make use of Pasteur’s system!’ However, not everybody is inclined to employ a system that consists in enriching oneself by the ruination of others.”

Joseph Lister, the young surgeon who developed antiseptic surgery methods wrote to Pasteur thanking him for his research in sepsis. We know this to be true since many of Lister’s early surgeries, using carbolic acid at the strengths advised by Pasteur, ended successfully, though the patient died. Bechamp was the first person to experiment with carbolic acid, and he warned against its toxicity. Pasteur poo-pooed this fear and presented his own theories to the world that Lister had picked up on. It took Joseph Lister a few more years of refining his techniques and using less and less carbolic acid to finally produce an antiseptic surgery in which the patient survived.

While Bechamp spent years proving that germs were the consequence of disease and not the cause, Pasteur’s theory was much simpler and highly profitable (not unlike the the "lipid hypothesis"). It made economic sense. It made money.

Another book that came out on this subject is The Dream and The Lie of Louis Pasteur, and can be found on the web in a few locations. If you are interested in learning more about the less than honest research of Pasteur, this is where to start.

Pasteur's family held onto his notes for a very long time. After his grandson died in 1975, they were finally released. This was when Professor Gerald Geison got a hold of them and presented his findings in 1993 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The New York Times, seeing how UNESCO had named 1995 the Year of Pasteur, felt that this would be the proper time to release Gerald Geison’s research. Don’t you just love a good drama?

The Myth of Pasteurization

One more thing before we go. Our second reference above makes this statement: "Pasteur developed ‘pasteurization’, a process by which harmful microbes in perishable food products are destroyed using heat, without destroying the food."

This is not entirely true. Pasteurization does NOT kill ALL harmful microbes in milk and it DOES harm the milk.

In her book, The Medical Mafia, Dr Lanctôt debunks pasteurization with a one-two punch:

1. The temperature is not high enough.
2. The temperature is too high.

First off, Dr Lanctôt points out that germs that bring us typhoid, coli bacillus, and tuberculosis are not killed by the temperatures used, and there have been a good number of salmonella epidemics traced to pasteurized milk.

Secondly, the heating process injures the milk. She points out that pasteurization destroys milk’s intrinsic germicidal properties, not to mention healthy enzymes. She goes on to state that 50% of milks calcium is unusable (the body cannot assimilate it) after pasteurization. So much for all those milk commercials.

Here’s something we found online that was drawn up for a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors concerning outbreaks from pasteurized milk:

• 1997, 28 persons ill from Salmonella in California, ALL FROM PASTEURIZED MILK.
• 1996, 46 persons ill from Campylobacter and Salmonella in California.
• 1994, 105 persons ill from E. coli and Listeria in California
• March of 1985 19,660 confirmed cases of Salmonella typhimurium illness FROM CONSUMING PROPERLY PASTEURIZED MILK. Over 200,000 people ill from Salmonella typhimurium in PASTEURIZED MILK
• 1985, 142 cases and 47 deaths traced to PASTEURIZED Mexican-style cheese contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria monocytogenes SURVIVES PASTEURIZATION!
• 1985, 1500 persons ill from Salmonella infection
• August of 1984 approximately 200 persons became ill with a Salmonella typhimurium from CONSUMING PASTEURIZED MILK
• November of 1984, another outbreak of Salmonella typhimurium illness from CONSUMING PASTEURIZED MILK
• 1983, over 49 persons with Listeria illness have been associated with the consumption of PASTEURIZED MILK in Massachusetts.
• 1993, 28 persons ill from Salmonella infection
• 1982, 172 persons ill (100 hospitalized) from a three Southern state area from PASTEURIZED MILK.
• 1982, over 17,000 persons became ill with Yersinia enterocolitica from PASTEURIZED MILK bottled in Memphis, Tennessee.

It is the author’s conclusion that pasteurization is simply a quick fix that allows large cartels to profit from the sales of milk. Instead of relying on safe, sterile handling procedures of raw milk (which would make the costs of milk much more expensive), we’ve incorporated this quick fix, which might or might not work, but certainly helps the cartels profit. If you live near a farm, go get yourself some raw milk. Heck, I’d even drink that!

References And Further Reading:

Ian's Voice

Vaccine Nation Movie Site

Dr Ghislaine Lanctôt, The Medical Mafia

Ethel Douglas, Bechamp or Pasteur (later published as Pasteur Exposed) 

R B Perason, The Dream and Lie of Louis Pasteur